Jamie Yates was heavily medicated, in a secure mental health unit, and in the middle of a breakdown when he had a profound dream. He was back in Liverpool, walking with his daughter along the tightly packed terraced streets which surround Goodison Park, home of the football club he had supported all his life.
When he left the hospital he took out a map, drew a half-mile radius around Everton’s ground and started looking for somewhere to rent.
From the terraced street to which he moved, 350 steps from the ground, he looks up at the time-worn home of Everton football club, bathed in a soft spring light. “I was so low, and I thought that if I could just walk out of my door and see this place every day, that would cheer me up,” he says. “I’m a sentimental old fool, but Goodison has been part of saving my life.”
For Yates, and tens of thousands of Everton fans (including some Guardian journalists), the Premier League club’s move to a state-of-the-art 52,888-seat stadium on the banks of the River Mersey at the end of this season is, to put it mildly, emotional. Sunday, when Everton play relegated Southampton at home, marks Goodison’s last top-flight fixture in the ground, the club’s home for the last 133 years.
Its Archibald Leitch-designed stands have seen the genius of Pelé, Eusébio and Beckenbauer. The Everton legend Dixie Dean scored a hat-trick here to reach a record 60-goal season tally. Fans have been married on its pitch, and the ashes of loved ones scattered.
So there was delight this week when the club made the shock announcement that Goodison would not be bulldozed at the end of this season, but would instead become the new home of Everton women. It was hailed as a gamechanging moment for the women’s game, and a statement of intent about the women’s team by new US owners, the Friedkin Group.
But the departure of the men’s team – and the disappearance of 40,000 Everton fans from these streets on match days – will still have a profound effect on many who live and work around the ground. Everton are yet to give precise details about what will happen to Goodison when the women move in next season, but with seats being sold off to season ticket holders the ground will be reconfigured and its capacity drastically reduced. After the move to Bramley-Moore dock next season, what will happen to those left behind?
In Goodison News, a stone’s throw away from the ground, Harneet Kaur welcomes a regular with a cheerful “alright girl?”, but her face clouds when the move is mentioned. “It’s going to be hard to pay the bills,” she says. “On match day it’s chokka in here. It’s like a party, it feels different. But it’s going to be a quiet life now, and I don’t like a quiet life.”
Sat among the royal blue and white EFC regalia in the Winslow hotel a little further down Goodison Road, manager Dave Bond explains that home games account for about 85% of the pub’s turnover. But complaints about a lack of parking and transport to the new ground have given him hope that his regulars will want to keep their old pre-match rituals, and he plans to put on buses from outside the pub on match days. “When you lose that massive footfall, you’ll never replace it,” he says. “But we have to try something.”
Others have decided to follow the blue smoke to the river. After a £800m outlay, Everton men’s new stadium rises resplendently from the water but – for now – there is little else around it. Neglected Victorian warehouses loom over deserted roads; a local timber merchant hedges its bets by promising “probably the BEST fence panels on Merseyside”.
The area is already changing. Industrial units bought cheaply before planning permission for the ground was granted are selling for 15 times the amount they were bought for. A new hotel is set to join the swanky Titanic, and fans seeking home comforts can look forward to Goodison staples The Hot Wok and the Blue House opening premises next to the new ground. “It’s a massive risk for us, but we 110% believe it will pay off,” says business owner Ben Brown. “By the 2028 Euros that area will be transformed.”
Everton estimate the new stadium will generate a £1.3bn boost to the economy of north Liverpool and create 15,000 jobs. But what about Goodison’s corner of L4, considered one of the poorest places in England? It will not be deserted, insists Sue Gregory, the chief executive of Everton in the Community, the club’s charitable arm which is staying put and will have offices in Goodison Park.
In the People’s Place, its pristine mental health and wellbeing hub next to Goodison, children with ADHD will still get support and residents will continue to be screened for heart and lung problems. At the next door People’s Hub, people with dementia can carry on passing on their memories. “The men are going to move to a different patch of grass,” says Gregory. “But people trust us here, we’re staying firmly in the community.”
And with the women’s team moving into Goodison, Yates – a keen historian with the Everton FC Heritage Society – hopes the site can perhaps relive the glory days that saw it host a record crowd of 53,000 people watching Dick, Kerr Ladies in 1920.
“Everton Women moving here means that this doesn’t have to be the end, and the legacy will continue,” he says. “There will still be football played at Goodison, I can still take my daughter. It could be really special.”
